Monday, June 13, 2005

Mac OS X Advantage

Don Mayer, from SmallDog.com, wrote something incredibly concise and apropos:

-------------------------------------------------------------------------- There are about 20 thousand things that distinguish Apple's OS X Tiger from the "operating" (using that term very loosely) systems found on PCs. Here's an overview of some of the important ones:

Reliability and Stability

1) Beneath the surface of Mac OS X lies an industrial-strength UNIX foundation hard at work to ensure system stability and performance.

2) If an application should ever crash, the Mac OS X memory protection prevents it from taking the rest of the system down, isolating the effect of misbehaving applications (see Tiger Recovery below for even more enhancement to this feature in Tiger).

3) Preemptive multitasking and multithreading lets a system do more tasks at the same time, safely and independently, which minimizes the impact of one application on another, improving system stability and performance.

Ease of Use

1) The Finder, Expose, and Spotlight make it easy to use, navigate, and find files and applications, eliminating frustration and increasing productivity.

2) You can quickly switch between users without quitting running applications by using Fast User Switching ‹ and it has really cool visual effects!

3) Mac OS X goes well beyond the U.S. government's Section 508 Accessibility statute to provide smooth, elegant features to those with difficulties using computers.

Applications

1) There are over 10,000 Mac OS X-based applications in areas such as education, digital media, professional design, productivity, web production, video editing, business, scientific research, and others.

2 There are Mac counterparts to popular Windows applications like Microsoft Office, Adobe InDesign CS, Adobe Photoshop, Intuit Quicken, Macromedia Dreamweaver, and Quark Xpress, to name but a few.

3) In addition, there are thousands of games available on the Mac, including titles such as Star Wars Jedi Night, Halo, Doom, Medal of Honor, and Myst.

Cross-Platform Interoperability

1) You can add a Mac to any environment with support for major file formats and network file services, as well as major peripheral and digital devices.

2) Mac OS X is compatible with every major file server protocol on every major server platform on the planet today, including AFP, SMB, WebDAV, NFS, and FTP. Mac OS X works well in Active Directory environments.

3) If you use Microsoft Exchange, you can sync your email and contacts with Mac OS X's Mail and Address Book applications automatically.

Security

1) Mac OS X's reliability, stability, and performance come from its industrial-strength UNIX foundation, which has more than 30 years of time-tested capabilities.

2) Apple's technology and open source business model allow Apple to respond more quickly to security issues when they arise.

3) Apple doesn't like to toot this horn, but there are fewer viruses and spyware for the Mac.

Even Intel recognizes this. During this week's Wall Street Journal "D: All Things Digital" conference, Intel chief executive Paul Otellini was pressed by Walt Mossberg about security on the Wintel platform, to which he offered a startling confession: He spends an hour a weekend removing spyware from his daughter's computer. Asked whether a mainstream computer user in search of immediate safety from security woes ought to buy a Mac instead of a Wintel PC, he said, "If you want to fix it tomorrow, maybe you should buy something else."

Mobility

1) Mac OS X keeps users connected to their work no matter where they go, allowing them to move effortlessly between networks and keep their communications and documents secure.

2) Business travelers can connect to their office networks using a standards-based VPN client.

3) You can connect to Mac, UNIX, and Windows file and print servers over wired and wireless networks using standard protocols.

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Another site to check out, comparing Mac OS X and Windows XP, is:

http://www.xvsxp.com

More reasons why I use and endorse Macs!